This Safeway is the worst location ever. It is primarily the poor, rude, and even aggressively rude treatment by the employees, especially the middle level management. I was trained in customer service as a courtesy clerk and understand that all positions in a grocery store or market are required to provide excellent customer service. The produce manager is rude and stares at us like a dead fish when I ask important and pertinent questions. Quite the opposite at Bel-Air and Forklift. My first two experiences at this Safeway upon returning to this town were extremely disappointing. I chose to drive to Folsom for 2 years rather than step foot inside. I was struggling with a handful of 1 Liter bottles of Geysers (5) at the self check while the front end manager stood there smirking rudely. He was actually laughing and not helping while the computer was giving me a hard time. Joking about it with a woman employee rather than help. I had left my own bags in the car and as my frustration mounted I was fumbling with them a little as the guy said "You can't take that outside, we have had thefts." Obviously trying to indicate that I look like some impoverished schmuck that would steal a stupid plastic hand cart, once again with a smirk and chuckle. I fumbled them out of the hand cart and as I was headed towards the door this moron says to my back "Hey, you need a bag!?." I said to him angrily "It's to late for that." Fake courtesy which is actually an insult. This treatment of people it quite common from most people at this particular store, and I think it's primarily motivated by racial bigotry, because the female friend who I shop with is from the Philippines, or Socioeconomic prejudice because they assume we don't have enough money to buy enough groceries to qualify as an essential customer. I am always careful with my choices based on a cost/quality ratio, also to make up for the fact that my friend virtually never takes cost into consideration. Stores we buy at are entirely predicated by quality of customer service and we have no problem shopping elsewhere. We have friends and family who also base shopping primarily on quality of service and have no issue avoiding buying at any Safeway whenever possible on the basis of our feedback. We often spent our $200+ weekly trip elsewhere after walking into this location and leave without buying anything. I also skip the bi-weekly $15-30 for extras and specialty items or ingredients. Average $200 x 4 + (25 x 2 x 4) x 12 = the loss of revenue from our household alone. After such treatment we choose also not to buy gas at Safeway. Again there was a Friday night when we came here together to buy supplies for our trip to Folsom on Saturday & Sunday. I noticed a large amount of valuable items like vitamins, supplements, and protein powder supplements, as well as organic canned goods and even filters for our Britta. Since there were a large number of marked down items, some still pricey, i.e. $24.00 protein powder at half price, I chose the normal check out aisle. We would have to deal with a clerk giving us childish and rude behavior anyways at the self check because of such items. Employees are sure to show disdain and displeasure when asked to ring in even 1 to 4 of these items. Being a Friday evening there was but one stand open, and the young man had to be called over to check us out. Both this boy and the 'courtesy' clerk were showing a lot of negative attitude towards us, as well as tossing the groceries, smashing bread, and damaging produce. This alone made me call for a manager, which I had to do several times. I also noted that this person was not scanning the sale tags, and was seeming to scan high priced items several times. He also left the moving belt behind him running so our groceries began piling up and spinning, some falling to the floor. They were rude about using the cloth bags I was trying to give them, insisting upon using new plastic Safeway bags. The clerk then began putting only 3-4 items per bag. We ended up with about 12 bags, which I had to pay for. Also the bill was somewhere near $290, which was not possibly accurate, even if he missed every mark down. There was a long line of customers behind becoming angry at us, though all the chaos and delay was being caused by employees. A female manager finally came and took over because I was yelling for this guy to stop until a manager arrived. She didn't listen to us and instead said there were other customers waiting behind us. I slid my card and was surprised that Wells Fargo allowed such an unusual sized purchase as it was my second large purchase that day. I knew everything was all wrong so we didn't unpack our groceries at home. I was tired already from packing for the trip and too tired to go over the items and receipt as we arrived home after midnight. We were correct and spent Saturday instead discovering that he had rang high ticket items up to 3 times and didn't scan any sale tags. read more
